Kanye’s Tweets: It’s So Easy to Believe
Last Sunday, Kanye let loose a torrent of Tweets — he apologized to Taylor Swift, but also did a little media studies self-scholarship, declaring himself the big black “King Kong” of the incident, an analysis that echoes Kristen Warner’s own reading on my blog in the days after the VMAs.
I would copy the full litany of Tweets below, but my screen shots necessarily make it appear in opposite order. You’ll get a better sense by reading Gizmodo’s rendering of the Tweets into “letter form” or by simply checking out Kanye’s Twitter Stream yourself — if you scroll down, you’ll happen onto the end of his Sunday tweets. But here’s just a sampling:
I picked this particular section because it emphasizes the authenticity of the comments — “these Tweets have no manager, no publicist, no grammar checking….this is raw.” Obviously, that was how these comments were received: as a pure conduit of Kanye-ness. Gizmodo says that Kanye and other artists on Twitter “mark the death of music magazines,” while Mashable goes to far as to claim that Kanye proves that Twitter has not only changed the way that we communicate, but “set information free.”
These articles demonstrate a utopian embrace of new interface — and to do so, they must take Kanye, and all celebrity Twittering, at face value. For these writers, the fact that the celebrity twitter account is “authenticated” (via a little check mark in the right-hand corner: yes, this is really Kanye!) means that the artist has dismissed all publicity and intermediaries, choosing instead to speak directly to the consumer/fan. And this move on the part of major artists, celebrities, and stars — everyone from John McCain to Snooki, from the Dalai Lama to Conan, harkens a new age in accessibility and, apparently, the end of the publicity apparatus.
Twitter (and its champions) have cultivated an image of authenticity and immediacy around the service. But just because the interface itself has embraced that image does not mean that it is necessarily true. Nick Muntean and I explored this concept (and its drawbacks) at length in our joint piece over at M/C Journal , and I explored the “cloud of authenticity” around celebrity Twittering on FlowTV way back in May 2009, when Ashton Kutcher raced CNN to the most followers.
Kanye's Avatar
The bottom line: just because Twitter claims to offer unmediated access does not mean that it is not mediated. Put somewhat differently: just because Kanye says that his Tweets have no publicist does not mean that they are not part of a generalized publicity strategy. Or, finally: Kanye is a publicity mastermind, and he — and his people — know exactly what they’re doing. The idea that we are gaining access to the “real,” intimate Kanye is the goal. The fact that most readers — and journalists — have bought into it affirms its efficacy.
As I’ve written about before, Twitter is most often used to buttress the existing star image. When a celebrity Tweets about his/her personal life, thoughts, inclinations, etc., it reaffirms that his/her pre-exisiting image is, in fact, more than image — it’s the “real” person. Thus when Kanye Tweets “sometimes I get emotional over fonts” or “just looking at my closet, wool suits, fedoras, trenches, and furs…I’m bout to put fall in the hospital…Ima hurt the season” , he is absolutely (and hilariously) reifying his existing, bombastic, over-the-top, and, yes, brilliant, image. And he’s no stranger to using New Media to cultivate this image — as many remarked when he first joined Twitter, it was surprising that he had even waited this long, as he has long used his own blog to speak “directly” to his fans (including a drunken post immediately after the Taylor Swift incident). He’s smart about reassuring his fans that it’s really him — regularly claiming that the existence of bad grammar and spelling proves that it’s him and not one of his publicists/employees.
Even in the above paragraph, I’m revealing my own vulnerability to the image-making machine. I attribute the entire Twitter stream to Kanye, even though there is no proof whatsoever that it is, in fact, Kanye West himself that is sitting at the computer typing these words. It’s just that all signs seems to point to the fact that it is him — and it’s much easier to believe than disbelieve. Of course, “Kanye West” (in quotes) is, in fact, Tweeting — the IMAGE of Kanye West is providing information to fans, providing access to the intimate details…..but of the IMAGE, not the man. if we consider the Twitter stream in terms of Kanye’s IMAGE, it makes no difference whether the man himself or others responsible for the cultivation of that image are actually writing the words.
What’s frustrating, then, is the illusion, or perhaps the neat acceptance, of Twitter accounts as the end of organized publicity and manufacture of image. Twitter is simply this particular moment’s medium of choice for transmitting image. Under the studio system, stars “wrote” columns, confessionals, and responded to fan letters personally — and the vast majority of readers believed that they were in fact gaining intimate access to the star. We look back on those interactions, and the willingness of fans to believe that their stars would in fact spend the time to write for a fan magazine or responding to individual fans, and recognize the absurdity. But in the ’30s and ’40s, what reason was there to doubt that a star wouldn’t want to tell you the “true story” of her childhood, her marriage, her rise to stardom? Her name was on the byline; she posed for the pictures, the quotes sounded like things she would say. To doubt the authenticity was tantamount to declaring your star a liar, a fake, and an image — and, by extension, your willingness to like that image was embarrassing and juvenile. So why doubt?
In fifty years, we might be thinking the very same thing about Twitter — and our willingness to believe that every Tweet comes from the fingers of its namesake, a pure extension of his/her mind and “real” self simply because it pops up instantly on our computer screen and bear’s the celebrities “authenticated” handle. No matter how real the Tweets seem, no matter how often the celebrity replies back, it’s still part of his cultivation of image, and our belief in its authenticity is absolutely crucial to sustaining the illusion.
But don’t get me wrong: I *love* following celebrities on Twitter. But as those interested in interrogating / thinking through stardom and celebrity, we should be just as “wary” of a Tweet from Kanye as we would be of a signed picture, arriving on our doorstep, signed “You’re the greatest, Anne Helen Petersen, I love your blog, Love, Kanye.” Ultimately, thinking and analyzing and doubting is not mutually exclusive to taking pleasure in these things. You can be smart about celebrities and love to “consume” them — all at the same time.
Destroyed by Pity?
First, a few links to a string of Antenna star/celebrity-based articles:
- “It’s a Bird, It’s a GaGa! It’s….Miley?” (Lindsay Garrison on the ridiculous new Miley video for ‘Can’t be Tamed. Sneak preview: She’s dressed as a GIANT BIRD)
- “I Don’t Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation: Glee Talks Back” (Sharon Ross, with a lively comments section)
- “Character Bleed, Or, What’s Lorelei Gilmore Doing with Nate Fischer” (Kristina Busse on the ways that television characters previous roles ‘bleed’ onto their new performances.)
Now onto the actual topic of the post…..celebrity pity.
This is the cover of last week’s US Weekly — the magazine’s counter to the People Mag Sandra Bullock bombshell. And while this cover isn’t nearly as compelling as Sandy with her baby giving the reader the ‘Don’t mess with my Mom’ look, it does touch on a sentiment that’s regained tremendous currency of late: namely, that these young women have been permanently damaged and distorted by fame….and it both is and is not our fault.
[Of course, this is no new phenomenon -- fame also ruined all the child stars of the 1970s and 1980s, just as it ruined Judy Garland. It's important to remember to historicize -- but I also think that what's happening with these celebrities -- and the very public and incessant cataloguing of their respective 'falls' -- is of a different intensity than that which has come before.]
The ladies of The Hills are in the spotlight because the show just began its final season, but the generalized sentiment (and its connection to tabloidization and reality TV in general) is by no means limited to Heidi et. al. US Weekly has participated in its fair share of blaming Kate Gosselin for ‘destroying her family’ through her quest for fame, while Jezebel recently published ‘In Defense of Lindsay Lohan,’ pointing to the ways in which Lohan’s current situation is the result of shitty, very public upbringing (and celebrity-hungry parents).
The Hills — and Heidi in particular — best represent this particular brand of destruction: the ideological work of celebrity is physically mapped on her body in the form of plastic surgery so drastic that it has made her back bow. She’s also unable to hug or run, and made her mother weep when she saw her. (For more on the tragedy of Heidi, see Liz Ellcessor’s fantastic guest post from a few months back comparing Heidi to Lady MacBeth).
The basic thesis of these pieces is that celebrities have been consumed by their fame — and that process of consumption has warped their ability to see themselves clearly, function in the real world, or follow the rules of society. They drive drunk, they do coke, they starve themselves, they post inappropriate messages on Twitter, they fight with their girlfriends in public, they spend tens of thousands of dollars on energy crystals. The thing about these celebrities that was compelling in the first place — the fact that they were beautiful but also mundane, living a life different than ours but also used the word ‘like’ every other sentence — is eclipsed by their transformation into entities wholly unrecognizable as a part of our daily existence. They turn from ‘just like us’ to ‘just like we never want to be.’ Indeed, it’s no accident that Lindsay Lohan is now so often compared to Gollum from Lord of the Rings: she’s no longer recognizable as human. They become freaks — physically and mentally distorted under the spotlight.
What’s fascinating to me, though, is the way that such articles elude to our participation, but evacuate the actual articles of any potential indictment, either of ourselves (as consumers of celebrity) or of the magazines/blogs themselves (as participants in the production of celebrity). Put differently, Heidi is destroyed by fame….but this destruction is (conveniently) discursively divorced from the fact that Heidi actually gained her current level of (in)fam(y) through a series of US Weekly covers two summers ago (and subsequent follow-ups).
US Weekly even ran a cover story about Heidi’s “Revenge Plastic Surgery” — effectively endorsing the fact that she used breast implants to get revenge (and find happiness).
Of course, gossip magazines are intended to make money — and the way they do so is by recycling stories, regurgitating details but framing them differently, making one party the villain and the other the victim….and switching the tactic the very next week. This worked brilliantly during the Jon and Kate maelstrom of last summer; it worked for Speidi the summer before that. And I’m not saying that US Weekly should suddenly turn hyper moral-/ meta-conscious and begin publishing editorials about the way in which it participates in the destruction of these women. That’d burst the illusion of celebrities simply occuring naturally — and illuminate the strings of production, which no one wants to think about. Most readers want to believe that celebrities simply exist…..and aren’t the product of a celebrity industrial complex. To acknowledge the production of celebrity is to acknowledge its hollowness.
What we should think of, however — especially as feminists — is the ways in which our participation as readers of these products does, indeed, contribute to this ‘destruction’…a destruction that afflicts female celebrities far more than their male counterparts. Even our pity for them — effectively allowing Heidi to think that her surgery was a great idea, as it managed to garner her more publicity — feeds that machine.
Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be interested in gossip, or that reading celebrity gossip blogs is akin to taking the knife to Heidi’s skin. That sort of blame and shame usually comes from those who are wholly critical and dismissive of celebrity and gossip in general; the people who tell you that by looking at the covers of magazine in the supermarket check-out line that you’re basically causing the end of the world as we know it. I’m neither that alarmist nor that condemnatory; obviously, I participate myself.
With that said, I do think it’s important for us, whatever our level of gossip consumption, to realize that the way that fame is destructive, and to acknowledge the fact that the industrial process that produces celebrity can’t function without readers. What’s happened to Heidi, Kristen, and Lindsay Lohan is what Lainey Gossip would call ‘sad smut’ — it’s the type of thing that we shouldn’t be pleasuring in. I may be disgusted by Heidi, but I also genuinely pity her.
When you pity someone, say someone you pass panhandling on the street, what do you do? Do you laugh at that person? Lecture her on the fact that she made decisions that led her there? Give her a paper you wrote on the fact that the structures of capitalism put her there? Probably none of the above. Usually you just avert your eyes and keep walking and try to forget. If anything, these US Weekly‘s are, somewhat ironically, forcing us to confront the result of fame — and our participation in it — on a daily basis. And while US Weekly is certainly part of the problem of profiting off of sad smut, it also provides a visual reminder that haunts the gossip blogs, the doctor’s office, the gym, the supermarket aisle, reminding us, if we choose to listen, of our participation.
And that’s the catch-22 and the delicate balance of celebrity gossip: it simultaneously produces and consumes celebrity….as it works to both encourage our consumption and make us feel shame for doing so.
Scaring Off The Grad Student Twitterati
First, a caveat: My apologies for authoring a third post on Twitter over the course of two weeks. I promise: we’ll get some good J-Lo gossip soon. What’s more, the post that follows deals with my experience this past weekend at an academic conference and how Twitter both accentuated and ‘scandalized’ those proceedings — while it will certainly be of interest to anyone who’s ever been concerned with how junior professionals grapple with how their name/image is bandied about in public spaces, there will be a little bit of ‘inside baseball’ academic talk.
With that said, I’ve just arrived home from a long weekend spent in Eugene, Oregon at the 2010 Console-ing Passions Conference. The funky name is a vestige of the 1990s, when pun-y, hyphenated names and titles were all the rage in academia — basically it’s a feminist media conference that deals with many of the texts, approaches, and concerns that have long been marginalized by mainstream media studies (although that situation is gradually changing). In other words, this was a conference with a ton of panels that dealt explicitly with identity politics (race, class, sexuality, gender, etc.) and also dealt with texts, such as my own objects of study (gossip, stars, celebrity et. al.), that are still eschewed by some in the academy. (At SCMS, the ‘big dog’ of media studies conferences, I had a senior male scholar visibly recoil and scoff when I told him that my dissertation was on the history of celebrity gossip).
For various reasons, there was no internet access at SCMS, a situation that rightly infuriated many participants (myself included), mostly because it prevented any sort of live Twitter coverage of the panels. Hello: MEDIA STUDIES CONFERENCE. This situation will of course be remedied at SCMS next year, but it also left many of us media studies scholars who are regular users of Twitter. Thus, when Console-ing Passions rolled around six weeks later, anticipation for what live-tweeting would like like — and how it would be received — was high.
Indeed, as both Jason Mittell and Max Dawson pointed out (through Twitter) almost immediately, one morning panel of CP had inspired more Tweets than the whole of SCMS. I myself live-Tweeted most of the panels I attended (if you follow me on Twitter, this was obvious); I greatly enjoyed being able to look back on what was live-Tweeting about my *own* presentation — not to mention participating in the back-channels that emerged during several panels and the plenary.
Melissa Click authored a great wrap-up of the conference over at Antenna, and Amanda Ann Klein has a great piece on the uses and mis-uses (including several Twitter highlights). As Amanda emphasizes, Twitter can create really productive conversation — but the particular interactions on the backchannel (and their ramifications) at this conference leads us, as scholars, to think about how Twitter will be used in the future — and if we should come up with some tentative ‘guidelines’ to guide us towards a proper conference Twitter etiquette.
Now, Amanda also draws attention to what might be the most controversial use of Twitter at the conference — an event that took place at the plenary. Here’s Click’s succinct recap of the plenary itself:
“The CP plenary was Friday’s anticipated event. The plenary, titled “Publishing What We Preach: Feminist Media Scholarship in a Multimodal Age,” included Bitch’s Andi Zeisler, the Queer Zine Archive Project’s Milo Miller, and scholars Michelle Habell-Pallan and Tara McPherson. While Zeisler discussed blogging’s utility in feminist activism, and Miller discussed the web’s utility for archiving “twilight media,” Habell-Pallan discussed the importance of new media in American Sabor, the first interpretive museum exhibition to tell the story of the influence and impact of Latinos in American popular music. All three speakers communicated important messages for feminists wishing to bridge activism and scholarship, but it was Tara McPherson’s polemic, “Remaking the Scholarly Imagination,” that captivated the audience and had conference Tweeters typing like crazy. McPherson challenged the CP audience to adjust to the changing nature of the humanities by engaging with “the materiality of digital machines,” namely code, systems, and networks.The CP plenary was Friday’s anticipated event. The plenary, titled “Publishing What We Preach: Feminist Media Scholarship in a Multimodal Age,” included Bitch’s Andi Zeisler, the Queer Zine Archive Project’s Milo Miller, and scholars Michelle Habell-Pallan and Tara McPherson. While Zeisler discussed blogging’s utility in feminist activism, and Miller discussed the web’s utility for archiving “twilight media,” Habell-Pallan discussed the importance of new media in American Sabor, the first interpretive museum exhibition to tell the story of the influence and impact of Latinos in American popular music. All three speakers communicated important messages for feminists wishing to bridge activism and scholarship, but it was Tara McPherson’s polemic, “Remaking the Scholarly Imagination,” that captivated the audience and had conference Tweeters typing like crazy. McPherson challenged the CP audience to adjust to the changing nature of the humanities by engaging with “the materiality of digital machines,” namely code, systems, and networks.
Now, what Click doesn’t mention — and perhaps rightly so — is that part of what had Tweeters typing like crazy was a potentially incendiary phrase uttered during the Q&A session. Discussing where media studies needs to go in order to remain relevant during the next century, McPherson pointed out that “as lovely and elegant as Lost is, it doesn’t really matter.” This particular phrase echoed through the Twittersphere, Tweeted by myself and others, reaching hundreds of scholars following the conference remotely. This particular point was one of the most circulated (at least virtually) of the conference, and inspired Jason Mittell to author a response of sorts on his blog entitled “Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do.” (For those of you not in media studies: there’s tension in the academia between those who think that studying actual texts is important and others who find it not as crucial to the future of the discipline. See McPherson’s response to Jason’s piece for more conversation on that point.)
Importantly, the comment simultaneously was and was not taken out of context. Sure, without actually hearing all of the talk — or the specific wording of the question to which McPherson was responding — it’s difficult to know exactly what she meant. But at the same time, myself and others were diligently live Tweeting snippets and key concepts from her address — which, to be very clear, I *loved.* Here’s just a sampling of what I tweeted from the talk — this was probably written over the course of about 3 minutes:
Thus, when I and others Tweeted her comment on “Lost doesn’t really matter,” it wasn’t without already having worked diligently to establish the other ideas and concepts that she was forwarding. McPherson herself was disappointed that a single comment — one that Nina Huntemann appropriately termed “media studies bait” was what many took away from the talk. Again, I’d like to emphasize that there were many other ideas taken away from the talk — especially the ‘silo-busting’ phrase — and that McPherson is correct to be disappointed if that’s what people remembered from the otherwise inspiring, challenging, deeply insightful address.
But not only would I say that it’s not what those in actual attendance took away — it’s also not what those in the Twittersphere took away…..unless they tuned in for a single 3-minutes of Tweets and refused to look before or after. And for better or worse, McPherson knew she was being live-Tweeted, and that that phrase, no matter the context ,would read as incendiary. As Bethany Nowviskie points out, most of those critiqued on Twitter at academic conferences are also *present* on Twitter and able to respond; appropriately, Tara McPherson regularly tweets from conferences and even live-tweeted the speeches leading up to her own.
Which all brings me to my overarching point and title of this post: how criticism of how scholars are Twitter has the potential to scare grad students away from using it — especially in the conference setting — altogether.
Because our conferences are (relatively) small and the number of people Tweeting them is even smaller, those who are participating in the backchannel are highly visible. Many people *follow* the backchannel on their smartphones, but participate little or not at all — in part because it’s too cumbersome to update swiftly and eloquently on such devices. Yet those who are updating frequently, as I was, in part because I had a computer, but also because I’m a ridiculously fast typist (thanks to an Apple IIe program called ‘PAWS’ that I played non-stop from age 5-8), my handle and name was incredibly visible on the feed. Looking at the stream now, I’d venture that 75% of the Tweets came from non-professors.
Put differently, those who are in some ways most vulnerable to rumor and word of mouth — e.g. graduate students — are not only doing most of the labor in making the conference visible to the rest of the world….but also exposing ourselves to criticism and visibility by those who think that a.) Twitter doesn’t have a place at conferences or b.) we’re ‘getting it wrong.’ What bothers me about these particular critiques is their passive aggressivity: if I’m doing it wrong, tell me so, either in real life or on Twitter. Part of why I like Amanda’s recent post so much is her willingness to think through what worked and didn’t work with Twitter at CP — but I think that we need to have more frank conversations, especially with those who not only don’t Tweet, but don’t read academic blogs. To put it plainly: we need to have conversations with those who are most critical and dismissive of Tweeting, who are most often (but certainly not always) senior scholars, and who are often in charge of whether or not we, as graduate students, get hired.
Of course, scholars, whether professors or grad students, shouldn’t write things on the backchannel that they wouldn’t say in the Q&A session, and I was very careful to craft my own comments according to that maxim. Twitter shouldn’t be a gossip session — it should be an opportunity to better formulate responses to what’s being said…and also to help open up the conference to those not in attendance. I’ve had several non-academics on my Twitterstream tell me how fascinated they were to see the ‘innards’ of an academic conference — and that’s *exactly* the sort of positive exposure that we, as scholars whose work is often undervalued or ridiculed by those outside of the academia, should be looking for.
But if our legitimate responses to a panel — whether in the form of transcribed a quote that struck us as particularly incendiary, asking for more attention to race/class, or simply bemoaning the fact that a scholar seemed to be dismissive of a topic — become a liability, then it’ll certainly discourage us from continuing to cultivate the back channel in the future. Junior scholars should be encouraged to participate in discourse, both critical and affirmative, about scholarship — whether in spoken conversation or Tweeted @s. But the visibility following this particular conference, especially as I’m about to enter the job market in the Fall, makes me think twice about whether I’ll be live-Tweeting again.
Twitter is Ruining Celebrity! (And Other Anxieties)
For whatever reason, last week seemed to be a tipping point for celebrities on Twitter. When Jim Carrey tweeted “Tiger Woods owes nothing 2 anyone but himself,” then criticized Woods’ wife, Elin, posting “No wife is blind enough to miss that much infidelity…Elin had 2 b a willing participant on the ride 4 whatever reason,” it was enough to prompt two separate articles, one from EW, the other on Jezebel, with the shared thesis that ‘Twitter is Ruining Celebrity.’
Here’s Jezebel’s explanation:
I’m just suggesting that certain people reconsider how goddamn annoying they can be. Because it turns out that plenty of high-profile people are not that smart, at least not all the time. Or at least not without the intervention of lots of people whose job it is to make them look good. And sometimes I would just rather not know how far short they fall.
If you’ve ever met a public figure you previously admired, you know it can seriously undermine whatever drew you to them in the first place. When I was pounding the pavement as a media reporter, there were plenty of writers and editors I met who more than lived up to fangirl expectations with their sparkling in-person insights. Then there were the ones that sloppily regurgitated conventional wisdom, or were giant social climbers or total leches. Still sorta ruins it every time I encounter their byline!
Twitter is like that, all the time.
The article then (rather hilariously) details how annoying/banal/mildly offensive some of these celebrities can be: Susan Orlean, who writes good pieces for The New Yorker, is a piss-poor and annoying Tweet author; Margaret Atwood is way too verbose; Kirsty Alley defends mild racism.
And, of course, there’s the whole John Mayer saga, exacerbated by his Twitter presence. Conclusion: when it comes to the Internet, some people should consider shutting up. Or, more specifically, some celebrities should consider shutting up — lest they shatter our illusions of celebrity and its function altogether.
So let’s be clear: these authors aren’t worried about overexposure. God knows the vast majority of celebrities who have taken to Twitter are already throughly, and arguable over, exposed. What seems to be at the crux of this anxiety — and what I find quite interesting — is this anxiety that the ‘authentic,’ unmediated sharing of Twitter will make the celebrity TOO real, TOO authentic…..too much like a real person. (You can see this anxiety invoked in the quote pulled from the Jezebel article in which the author compares Twittering to meeting someone you admire in the hallway — when you meet him/her in the flesh, she becomes an *actual person,* with blemishes, bad breath, bad jokes, whatever).
Undulating beneath both articles is an unstated assumption about celebrities: namely, that they are IMAGES, not people. We are attracted to the ideas — of race, of gender, of relationships, of Capitalism, of America — that they represent, not who they actually are. As I tell my students over and over again, it doesn’t matter who a celebrity is in the flesh, or what he/she ‘truly’ believes, or whether he/she is ‘actually’ a nice person. All that matters is how he/she is mediated — sometimes more successfully than others — and whether the public finds that image salient.
Some Twitter celebrities do a fantastic job of further extending their well-pruned image through Twitter use. Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Conan O’Brien all come to mind. (Importantly, all three use Twitter somewhat sparingly: their Tweets become fetishized, heavily retweeted, and are rarely all that banal. Each one seems to perfectly fit with the stars established image, as when Bieber tweets “a cool thing about 2day is that North Tonawanda, NY has 32k people in it…just like my town. Maybe the next kid with a dream is there.” It’s cheesy and sincere, but so is Justin Bieber….or, more accurately, so is Justin Bieber’s image.
Celebrities are ‘ruined,’ then, when they become too much like people — and disclose so much, and in such an uncontrolled fashion, that their images are impugned. We want the celebrity image to cultivate the crucial tension between the extraordinary and ordinary — between the knowledge that the celebrity eats food and the also goes to premieres and buys expensive clothes. But when the ordinary overwhelms the extraordinary, it creates an imbalance in the celebrity image. The celebrity image becomes imbalanced via his own disclosures, whether linked to bathroom habits or preference for ‘chocolate’ men. To stick with the metaphor, such imbalance causes the image to fall, causing a rupture….and the unseemly ‘real’ person behind the finely wrought celebrity image seeps through, causing disgust.
When you get down to it, celebrity twitter exposes are desire for celebrities to be ‘just like us’ as a fallacy. We don’t want them to be just like us. We don’t want them to Tweet just like us. We want them to be a simulacrum of ‘just like us.’ Put differently, celebrities should represent our ideal what a ‘real’ person is like, but we can’t look at that representation too closely, or ask it to Tweet….lest it reveal the hollowness beneath.
I’m not suggesting that celebrity culture — or our fascination with it — is hollow, or worthless. Rather, that the anxiety over Twitter (and other new media means of over-disclosure) are highlighting the disparity between what we think we want from celebrities….and what we actually want.
Tweeting = The New Hollywood PR?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter’s function in Hollywood of late. In part because I just finished reading P. David Marshall’s fascinating essay ‘The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media‘ in the inaugural issue of Celebrity Studies, which you can access in full (and for free!) (Imagine my tremendous surprise and delight when I reached the end of the essay and realized he had cited my earlier work on celebrity Twitter and the generation of authenticity . While I don’t always agree with Marshall (his understanding of the way that celebrity works is far more deterministic than my own — in his major work on the subject, Celebrity and Power, he theorizes celebrity as a means of generating self-surveillance and complacency in capitalist democracies) I admire his work tremendously . Along with Graeme Turner, Su Holmes, Chris Rojek, and Joshua Gamson, he was amongst the first to rigorously theorize the way that celebrity functions within society. In other words, his work helped make celebrity studies (and not just ‘star’ studies) legitimate, and it is an honor to think that I contributed to his thought process.
Tangent over — and back to Twitter. My thoughts on the ways in which celebrities generate clouds of authenticity around themselves and their disclosures remain static. While Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore may have tempered their Tweeting, the number of celebrities who have taken to Twitter over the past year has increased exponentially. Whether Conan or Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Taylor or Coach from Survivor, Twitter has firmly established itself as a means of extending one’s celebrity persona/image.
But Twitter and production information is another matter entirely. Hollywood observer Anne Thompson (an avid Tweeter herself) recently wrote a series of posts dealing with the ways in which Twitter is changing the way that publicity for films in pre-production, production, and post-production has been disseminated. Historically, such information was the provenance of the trades (Variety and Hollywood Reporter). When Entertainment Weekly debuted in the early ’90s, selling itself as a ‘trade for the mainstream,’ it began to trade similar information — but rarely were they exclusives or breaking news, in part due to the EW‘s weekly publication schedule. (Side note: if you ever meet me and get a glass of wine in me, make sure and ask me about my hilarious childhood devotion to EW.)
But with the trades in free fall for myriad reasons, most of the breaking trade news has migrated online — most prominently to Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily, but Anne Thompson’s ‘Thompson on Hollywood’, The Wrap, and even non-insider blogs like Cinematical are all now breaking trade news. Granted, Finke’s blog is probably the only one providing the sort of ‘inside baseball’ info traditionally organic to the trades, but the popularity of all of the aforementioned speaks to the growing fascination with production details outside of Hollywood. Put differently, ‘laymen’ — whether academics or just those independently interested in the industry — have become conversant in the trade language of Hollywood, and hunger for specifics concerning signing details, actor salaries, mergers, and weekend grosses.
Why are people more interested? Can we attribute it to increased levels of cinephilia? (Or DVD culture?) Not necessarily, no. When I was researching Entertainment Tonight and its start in the very early ’80s, I found dozens of articles trumpeted ET’s innovation and brilliance in their move to provide such information to the general public. Up to that point, no one was reporting how much stars were making, how much films were grossing, or how different television shows were faring in the ratings. But once that information was provided, the public came to view it as crucial in determining whether a show as successful — or whether they could call themselves an expert on a show, a movie, a star, or Hollywood more generally. If you provide stats, even if they’re ultimately somewhat meaningless, as reported weekend box office takes can be, people will begin to think of those stats as essential. Today, the general public is so versed in the parlance of weekend box office — and so assured that opening weekends determine the popularity of a film — that such stats turn into self-fulfilling prophesies. A #1 weekend ensures that the film will continue to draw consumers, not because the film was good, but because it’s so obviously marked as ‘popular.’ (Unless, of course, that film is G.I. Joe). (See also my summer piece on how box office speculations — and the discourse of ‘box office disappointment’ — unfairly doom pictures like Public Enemies).
So how does Twitter fit into this? As Thompson explains, more and more, stars, producers, and directors are taking to Twitter to break their own news, essentially obviating the need for trades altogether. Jon Favreau just Tweeted the (theretofore unannounced) news that Harrison Ford would be starring in his new picture; Tom Hanks posted a Twitpic of his casting session for his new film; Jerry Bruckheimer reports from screening of Prince of Persia at Wondercom. Jon Favreau posted a ton at the beginning of Iron Man 2, apparently got in trouble, but is now back at it, as evidenced by his Ford announcement.
To my mind, there are two forces precipitating this move. First, as described above, the lay men (e.g. the vast majority of those following the likes of Favreau, Bruckheimer, etc.) is hungry for ‘insider’ information. And, even more importantly, he/she will feel more ‘a part’ of a product with which they’ve been intimate for a long time. In this way, providing ‘inside’ information from pre-production is basically a way of hooking ticket buyers early: if they get in at the ground floor, they’re be more likely to show up to see the top put on the skyscraper. Second, Hollywood is, without a doubt, in financial crisis. No matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars made by the huge blockbusters, it still takes a tremendous amount of money to get a film made — and part of that ever-escalating budget is P.R. Thus, if you can publicize your film for NOTHING to an audience of millions of self-selected fans via Twitter…..why not? The same logic holds for the celebrity using Twitter to promote their general image: why keep a P.R. agent and stylist on retainer when you can publicize yourself with little more than an internet connection and a free Twitter account?
So it’s a smart business move. But it’s inciting all sorts of anxiety, in part because it, like the dissolution of the trades, threatens to fundamentally change the way that Hollywood does business. Because Hollywood, as an industry, is much more than simply the people who actually ‘make’ the movies — it’s also composed of vast armies of agents, assistants, managers, and P.R. agents. And if you take away those middlemen, replacing it with Twitter, a tremendous amount of people will be out of work. In some ways, I think the seismic effects of the internet (and digital technology more broadly) can only be compared to the demise of the studio system in terms of wide-spread ramifications in the way that Hollywood does business.
Which isn’t at all to suggest that the P.R. agent and agency is dead, or that the trades (print or online) will be rendered obsolete. The number of actors, producers, and directors using Twitter to break news straight to the consumer is still proportionally minuscule. But the possibility is there — and it’s going to continue to cause anxiety. What interests me most, then, is that it took a platform as widely ridiculed as Twitter to make both the movement itself and anxiety over it visible.
